ESA User Services powered by Open Source

Good afternoon everybody. We're going to present how the European Space Agency - ESA - is using Open Source Software for their new User Services.

Let me briefly introduce the authors:

Thmoas Bonfort - Famous for starting the MapCache project and core committer of MapServer.

Fabian Schindler and myself from the small Austrian company EOX. Committer of MapServer and initiator of EOxServer.

Outline

ESA User Services - ngEO

ngEO Browse Server

MapCache Enhancements

Live Demonstration

We will start with an introduction to ESA's new User Services infrastructure called ngEO, short for Next Generation Earth Observation.

It will be followed by a brief introduction of the design and functionality of the Browse Server component of ngEO.

We will highlight some MapCache enhancements originating from ngEO.

Last but not least we will try a Live Demonstration which our connection hopefully allows.

ESA User Services - ngEO

Operational Fully Online Data Access Service

GMES and ESA Legacy Satellite Missions

Fully Centralised Configuration Management

Generic System usable for any Mission

The main objective of the new ESA User Services is to provide a fully Online Operational Data Access Service.

ESA provides access to satellite data from the European initiative GMES which stands for Global Monitoring for Environment & Security or, as it is called nowadays, Copernicus as well as ESA's legacy missions like Envisat.

Another objective of the new system is a Fully Centralised Configuration Management. I come back to that in a second.

In summary ESA wants to develop a generic system that is easily usable for any mission.

ngEO Browse Server - Architecture

Entirely based on Open Source Software:

GDAL for raster processing

MapServer for OGC services support

EOxServer for Earth Observation extension

MapCache for extremely well performing WMTS and WMS access

TBD

ngEO Browse Server

Entirely based on Open Source Software

OGC's WMTS and WMS Standards

Configuration from ngEO Controller

Data ingested by ngEO FEED

Authentication using Shibboleth

Authorization from ngEO Web Server

TBD

Won't go into details of the OGC services. Please look it up there is plenty of information available.

Time dimension support

<tileset name="foss4g">
...
<timedimension type="sqlite" default="2013">
<dbfile>/var/ngeob_data/mapcache.sqlite</dbfile>
<query>select strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ',start_time)||'/'||strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ',end_time) from time where source_id=:tileset and start_time<=datetime(:end_timestamp,'unixepoch') and end_time>=datetime(:start_timestamp,'unixepoch') and maxx>=:minx and maxy>=:miny and minx<=:maxx and miny<=:maxy order by end_time limit 100</query>
</timedimension>
</tileset>

Visual representations of search results e.g. single browses or all browses in a specific time interval

TBD

Read-only functionality

<tileset name="foss4g">
...
<read-only>true</read-only>
</tileset>

Absent tiles are considered empty instead of being sent to WMS for generation